Student Voice and TEDxOntarioEd

I’ve sat down to type my reflection on TedxOntarioEd every evening since it took place on April 9th. I’ve written about what it was like to get to know the amazing organizing team of Jamie Weir, Ben Hazzard, Rodd Lucier, Sharon Drummond and Colin Jagoe. I’ve written about the speakers, motivation and meeting people from my PLN for the first time. My words cannot do any of this justice. They seem dry and flat.

So, inspired by Ben Hazzard’s blog post, I now choose to incorporate my thoughts on student voice and TEDx with images from the night and feedback on my writing, provided by my friend Stacy Someville @stacesome (seen below with her husband, Vince).


Me: Last Friday night educators gathered for TEDxOntarioEd. Throughout the evening we heard from adults, or former students. Tim Long, writer and executive producer for The Simpsons, reflected on his experiences as a student in the gifted program at South Huron District High School. Jesse Brown, host and co-producer for Search Engine, reflected on what it was like as a student who enjoyed and honored texts that weren’t valued by his high school teachers. Paul Finkelstein, Stratford Northwestern teacher and slow food advocate, shared his old report cards with us (and apparently with his principal) and recognized that he now creates a class that he would have enjoyed as a student.

















My friend, and Avon Maitland's student success co-ordinator, Stacy Somerville, wrote her master’s thesis on the ways that our school stories shape us as teachers and as people. At the TEDxOntarioEd after party, she spent a lot of time talking about this, but even more time talking about Tim Ludwig, a student presenter from Petrolia. Tim's story isn’t a reflection. It is now. It is his reality, his everyday life. The pause in his speech while he struggled to find words and his place was, for me, symbolic of the need to listen to our students.

Stacy: Yes! And not fill in the blanks with our thoughts and what we think he is thinking. And wait time. Someone else mentioned time - giving people the 'permission' to take time to learn.

Me: We were a room full of educators. If we had jumped in, if we had interrupted Tim while he struggled to find his thoughts, what would we have said? Would our words, thoughts or instructions have changed Tim’s narrative? Instead, we listened and let him find his way of constructing the story he wanted to tell us.


















Stacy: And I had goosebumps and a big lump in my throat. Love that kid. To speak fearlessly and honestly - very powerful.

Stacy is right. Our school stories shape who we are, and for our students, they will shape who they will become. We should spend more time listening.

Co-constructing Criteria? Try Developing an Acronym with Students

In an effort to improve student responses to lab questions, Peggy, a Science teacher at Stratford Central Secondary School, developed a strategy for co-constructing criteria. Instead of creating a large anchor chart or poster, Peggy had students create what she calls bumper stickers. These are small pieces of paper that students will use as anchors, but keep in their notebooks.

Here are the steps Peggy used to co-construct criteria with her grade 10 Science class, followed by a short video of Peggy explaining the activity.

1. Use an activity to create random groups or pairs.

2. In groups or pairs, students brainstorm 3 or 4 steps or strategies that they follow when answering questions. Students use small white boards and dry erase markers to record their brainstorming.

3. Once the group agrees on their criteria for answering questions, one group member transfers the steps or strategies to the blackboard.

4. As a class, the students and teacher organize the information, grouping like ideas with like ideas, until they have distilled the criteria to 6 points.

5. The class then comes up with a word for each point and they use these words to create an acronym.

Peggy's class came up with the acronym SPLASH

S – Snap the question (identify the given and requested information)
P- No pronouns. Be specific.
L – Language. Use scientific language.
A – What is the question asking? Am I answering the question?
S – Support my thinking with evidence like diagrams.
H – Use half of the question in my answer (wording).


Peggy explains her activity and SPLASH in this short video clip.

I'm very sad to share the news of Peggy's death just a little over a week after we filmed and posted this video. Please consider this blog post and video as a tribute to a truly exceptional teacher. Peggy, we will miss you.



Photo by

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chris_gin/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

Will Our Digital Lives Become Digital Histories?

A recent episode of Spark on CBC radio made me think about the way we teach history. The program dealt, in part, with using digital technology to preserve memories, heritage and culture. In a particularly poignant story, Meryl Swiatek recalls finding a cassette tape of her mother reading children’s stories nearly nine years after her mother died of cancer. Meryl notes the importance of technology in preserving the memory of her mom and comments,

“. . . that got me thinking about how my life is preserved. I have almost 1000 twitter updates . . . and a handful of videos on YouTube. I preserve myself and my life digitally every single day without even thinking about it.”

And that got me thinking about the first time I ventured down this thought path. It started as a conversation about narrative when Alec Couros @courosa helped me recognize how the digital medium changes story telling.

And that is where I was stuck for oh . . . 5 months.
Although we weren't discussing history in these tweets (above) , that is where this has ended up for me.

Digital History

The internet has no shortage of digital history resources. Digital history involves the use of digital media to preserve, present and study history. Scanned archives, audio files, timelines and interactive maps are examples of digital history and history teachers are using these resources to bring history to life for students. But there is no reason why history students shouldn’t contribute to the digital history ‘pool’. Ideally, they should be creating digital history resources by capturing oral histories and archiving documents and they should learn these research and archiving skills in their history classes. The CBC Spark episode referenced at the beginning of this post provides suggestions and ideas for scanning and capturing audio, including interviewing tips.

Currently, digital history seems confined to websites or blogs as public museums or places that house resources for the study of history. It has yet to fully embrace the idea of digital texts as primary sources. If we are preserving ourselves and our lives digitally every single day, these records will be the historical evidence we use tomorrow.

Shouldn’t students’ research skills shift to consider digital resources, like websites, blogs and tweets, as historical texts? If a diary entry is a primary source, a blog post is a primary source. Shouldn’t students understand how they differ (hint: audience and purpose) and how that shapes the reading of these texts?

Will political historians consider tweets? What will the future make of tweets like this one by President Obama (or his ghost tweeter) which may have been read by as many as 3, 477, 140 of his Twitter followers?

What happens to the study of history in a world of living documents?

What happens to social history in the world of social media?

What happens when our students ask “how do we reference twitter in an essay?”

Please share your thoughts on our digital lives becoming digital histories.

Photo by http://www.flickr.com/photos/danisarda/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Classroom Structure and Social Learning

Last week I was at St Marys DCVI for one of our board's teacher inquiry meetings. At the end of the session, Richard Farmer, an English teacher with an interest in technology and cooperative learning, asked me if I would like to see some of the structural changes he has made in his classroom.

Richard does not have expensive, new materials in his room. He has salvaged tables from around the school, but the arrangement of his classroom space speaks to the value he places on social learning. Here are two video clips and some pictures. Richard has given me permission to share.